Tag: video

Creating videos is something that takes practice. There are so many little steps to remember and if you don’t produce regularly, you forget! Like when I upload a video to Youtube, which of the kazillion export options is the one I’m supposed to use? And whoops, now that the video has gone public and started getting views, I realize I used the old “outro” without the preview of the last video. Oh well. An annotation can still do the job, just not as elegantly.

For my Cinderella Interviews series, I’ve been using Google Hangouts to interview other authors who have written Cinderella fairy-tale retellings. In this latest example, Marissa Meyer was passing through town on her Fairest book tour so I took the Cinderella Interviews on a special road trip to the Lunar Ball. It was a fun way to shake up the series and refresh some of my video-editing techniques (as well as my on-call teen son’s editing skills.)

I bought a new camera and this was its first test. However, I about had a heart attack when I went to play back the interview and the time stamp showed 30 secs. What? It was supposed to be a few minutes!!! Did I do that thing that all dad’s do: press record at the wrong time and only record my feet after the interview was over? *dies*

But no, the interview was there. I could breathe again. I must have misread the time stamp.

I’m still learning to use the camera, and I was very pleased with the quality of the video. However, when I uploaded it to Youtube, it lost some of it’s crispness. I’ll have to play with my export settings and find the one that works best with my new camera. Baby steps.

So, I took Katie Davis’s Video Idiot Bootcamp course to try to learn how to market to a YA audience who loves videos. Big learning curve on so many levels. But, we have to start somewhere, and here at Routines for Writers, we are all about finding routines that make our writing and marketing lives easier.

After taking the class, I planned to make one new video a month. At the end of the year, I would have twelve videos that would continue to work for me 24/7. That sounded doable. And I am mostly on track to achieve that goal. Sometimes I go 6 weeks between videos. Some of my videos are time-specific, like my newsletter contest that is now over.

I meant to try a variety of videos–webcam; stock photo/video; cartoon, but because of time crunches, ended up with mostly videos of me talking, and one dynamic slide-show type video. Now that my debut month is over, I hope to have more time to try these other kinds of videos.

And always, at the back of my mind, I was trying to think about a routine for content. What could I do to routinely make videos?? So, I came up with this idea: Coffee with Authors, a Google Hangout on Air event.

A Google Hangout on Air is a video conference that is broadcast live, so anyone can watch, and is then recorded to your YouTube channel. You don’t have to have extra screen-capture software as Google takes care of it for you. You can have up to ten people on air with you, although when there are more than two, I think you need to use external microphones to keep out the echoes.

Here is my first Coffee with Authors. I’m hoping the more I do, the more relaxed and natural it will become. Debut YA author Ashlee Willis was a good sport about being my first guinea pig! I get her talking about painting fairy/gnome doors on trees and she gets me talking about a not-official announcement.

Have you tried a Google On Air? Any do’s and don’ts I should know about?